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Hamilton-Wentworth Family Action Council |
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Along With Same-Sex Marriage Comes a School Curriculum to Teach Homosexuality to Our Kids |
January 17, 2005, by Bob Maton, Ph.D. - Faith Groups and the Toronto Experience - The Ideology of the HWDSB School Board Stakeholders - Endnotes |
| Same-sex marriage is now on the federal government agenda and will shortly be introduced to Parliament for passage. The effect of the legislation on our children and families will be devastating. The legislation means that same-sex marriage will be taught by the schools as an equal lifestyle choice for future generations. Research on homosexual couples in the U.S. by the Family Research Council and others has found that their relationships have shorter duration, carry significant health risks leading to much shorter lives, have lower levels of faithfulness, far higher suicide rates, and much higher rates of intimate partner violence than heterosexual couples. ¹ In Sweden, where same-sex marriage has been in place for 10 years, the divorce rate among gay men is one and a half times that for heterosexual couples, and among lesbians it is three times as high.² The presence of children does not reduce divorce, and so kids in homosexual marriages suffer much more stress and dislocation than their peers in heterosexual families. With the decline in the importance of marriage in Sweden, fifty-three percent of their kids are now born outside of marriage. Susan Martinuk recently published a piece in the National Post (December 31st), which describes the efforts of homosexual activists in BC to challenge the provincial school curriculum at the BC Human Rights Tribunal. They want to change the school curriculum so that it openly affirms "queer issues." They admit there is no evidence of discrimination or derogatory comments in the curriculum. Their argument goes that the very absence of queer issues is discriminatory, constituting evidence of "omission and suppression" of the homosexual lifestyle in the schools. They want a curriculum that promotes "queer history and political figures … positive queer role models … same-sex marriage and adoption." In Ontario, the homosexual activist agenda has been making itself felt in school boards for some time now. Multi-sexual orientations are already taught in the Toronto, Peel and London School Boards. In these schools kids are taught to affirm their homosexual or bisexual schoolmates and families, and to "discover" their own sexual preference. Later on they absorb harm reduction techniques, i.e., how to have sex while avoiding the pitfalls of sexually transmitted diseases. The Hamilton Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB) recently adopted an Equity Policy, which opens the way for a similar school curriculum. ³ In its first cut, the Equity Policy is aimed at racism, but the Board has a plan to tackle same-sex discrimination shortly. The Chair of the Equity Committee, Board Trustee Jessica Brennan, has said the Board will put the Equity Policy into practice through an aggressive "unlearning process" in the schools. |
Faith Groups and the Toronto Experience | |||||||||
| In Toronto schools the lesson plans for every subject are saturated with sexualized language and ideas. Heterosexism as an oppressive archetype is systematically attacked throughout the curriculum. Students are assigned literature critical of heterosexism as the hegemonic paradigm 4 in our culture. When the plan was introduced by the Toronto Board - after being developed without consultation from the broad public, including faith-based groups - it elicited violent opposition from parents. Fistfights broke out at one meeting. Parents who object to lessons are now banned from school property. The Board has failed to recognize broad opposition to the curriculum, including many ethnic and cultural groups whose faith and cultures vehemently oppose homosexual behaviour. 5 Three years ago, the Hamilton Board tried to implement an anti-homophobia curriculum similar to the Toronto model. However, there was no policy basis for the plan at the time, and it was placed in abeyance. The Equity Policy in place now provides the perfect vehicle to complete the project. This time round the objections of immigrant racial and ethnic groups will be easier to counter, since discrimination against their children is also addressed. If they are happy with an anti-discrimination policy for race and ethnicity, it will be harder to fight against one for homosexuality too. The area where the aggressive agenda becomes clearest is in the definitions of terms contained in the policy's Glossary. The definition of "curriculum" is no longer restricted to subjects and courses. It is now a cultural, social control concept extending to "all learning experiences the student will have in school, the total school environment, and all interaction among students, staff and the community." "Culture" includes all of "language, religion, race, gender, experience, migration/ immigration, social class, political affiliations, family influences, age, sexual orientation, geographic origin, ethnicity, experience or absence of experience with discrimination, experience of fighting discrimination and other injustices." Culture includes nearly any definition one can have of oneself. Apparently, anyone can adopt just about any behaviour or perspective and justify it as their "culture." Further, these terms are divisive. This way of thinking sets kids against each other and politicizes their stake in the education system. Discrimination is defined as "unequal treatment of non-dominant groups or individuals, either by a person, a group or an institution with dominant identity which, through the denial of certain rights, results in inequality, subordination and/or deprivation of political, educational, social, economic and cultural rights." Now we are getting to the meat. The cultural groups who do not identify with the categories in the culture section are here defined as dominant. This is not the language of liberal democracy. Who defines whether a particular child is from a dominant or non-dominant group? And what kind of an ideology fits little children into this language of power and submission? The Glossary defines equity as "equality of outcome." There is no effort made to acknowledge "equality of opportunity," which is astonishing since this is the foundation of liberal democracy and of all human effort to make progress. If you want to achieve equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity, you must discriminate against the "dominant groups" of kids identified above, and lower the achievement bar for those in the non-dominant group. And so the Equity Policy does that. "In order to ensure equality of outcome, equity programs treat groups differently when the situation in society precludes equal treatment. Equity programs are more inclined to accept the priority of collective rights over individual rights." So the policy leaves the way clear for the collective rights of the groups identified as subordinate (including homosexual groups) to be privileged over those of anyone determined to be from a dominant group. Whatever happened to individual achievement, the Charter of Rights, and due process? Finally, the policy defines race and ethnicity as "socially, politically and historically constructed." These terms are code for a particularly nasty ideological framework, which will be discussed later. Essentially, the new policy defines the school and its curriculum as a "total institution" where all activities and mindsets are controlled, and a particular value system is promulgated to all of its inmates. Tolerance of difference is out. Don't forget, these are kids we are talking about. "Dominant" and "non-dominant" groups of kids will be labeled and treated differently, using criteria that include just about every human difference. Then the so-called dominant kids will be disadvantaged by a redistribution of resources to those kids considered to be disadvantaged, including homosexual kids or kids from homosexual families. Individual achievement and talent will be suppressed in favour of collective rights. The justification for all this is that human characteristics such as gender, race, sexual preference, ethnicity, etc. have no objective meaning. Rather, they are all socially, politically, and historically constructed. Anything seems possible in this radical, Orwellian, post modernist world. The Hamilton Equity Policy, similarly to the Toronto policy, was developed nearly entirely by members of the education hierarchy and trade unionists representing teachers and school support staff. The Committee included no representation from parents or School Councils at all, and hardly any from the broad community. 6 And so, similarly to the Toronto, Peel and London experiments, the new policy in Hamilton sets a risky course, which reflects the preferences of a very limited and predisposed group of stakeholders. |
The Ideology of the HWDSB School Board Stakeholders | |||||||
| In its communications about the policy, the Board has identified its ideological position as "secular humanist," 7 which appears benign enough. Secular humanism as a term has come into use in the last thirty years or so to describe a world view characterized by healthy skepticism and love for humanity. Secular humanists profess to be curious, peaceful, rational, and tolerant of other perspectives. They accept the possibility of objective truth, but believe that the commitment to perpetual growth and learning that we all share implies that our understanding of truth is always under renovation. Secular humanists do not necessarily deny the existence of God, but do insist that God has no place in human affairs, and so God is irrelevant. Except for the God part, this seems well and good. Most Canadians identify themselves as Christian, not secular humanists (in fact only 1,245 individuals in the entire country identified their belief system as "Humanist" in the Statistics Canada census of 1991)8 . However, be that as it may, what is very alarming is that despite the Board's statements about its commitment to secular humanism, in many respects the Equity Policy and the anti-homophobia curriculum turn their backs on this relatively benign approach, in favour of a much more aggressive "social constructivist" ideology. Daniel Cere, a Professor in the Education Faculty at McGill University, has identified social constructivism as underlying the goals and political agenda of the homosexual movement in Canada. 9 It is important to understand the terrain of social constructivism clearly in order to see the risks associated with it, and how it connects with the HWDSB Equity Policy. As Cere describes it, in essence social constructivism views all knowledge as relative and a forum of political struggle. Meaning and intention are socially constructed. The characteristics of the physical body - such as race and gender - are without any real basis in the realm of meaning. 10 Social constructivism posits that there is no objective truth or knowledge; that reality, truth and power are built entirely through the use of language as the vehicle of culture; and that all perspectives on reality are socially constructed - including definitions of sex, gender, race, body, heterosexuality, and homosexuality. (Note the similarities with the definitions of ethnicity and race in the Equity Glossary). In this framework, the physical body has no meaning of its own but is viewed merely as "raw material" for the social construction of selfhood. Selfhood in turn is infinitely malleable, and is not predetermined biologically. Thus being a man or a woman is not determined by sex but by culture and choice. What is politically dangerous about all this is the belief that opposites such as male/female, heterosexual/homosexual, black/white are suspect, since these dualities tend to classify reality in ways which privilege one side and victimize the other. Heterosexuality as a social category is intrinsically suspect, since it signifies repression and victimization of its opposite - i.e., homosexuals. Heterosexism is vilified by the homosexual activist community as repressive and a negation of their right to equality. Important to the current debate about whether same-sex marriage threatens marriage itself is the belief that marriage represents another opposition - of male and female - and is therefore also fundamentally suspect and an arena of political struggle. The obvious solution to these so-called power imbalances and contradictions is a continuing struggle for the elimination of such categories as sex, gender, body, heterosexuality, homosexuality and marriage altogether, which means fundamentally altering the traditional values of Western society. It cannot be emphasized too much that social constructivists view themselves as being in constant struggle against the "tyranny" of alternative points of view and practices. In contrast to the humanists, they are intolerant of other, more mainstream perspectives, which they consider to be repressive. 11 Before we dismiss these assertions as hyperbole, we have become increasingly aware that the post-modernist ideology also provides the rudder for a large proportion of the academic community - which is already heavily influencing our kids. 12 Barbara Kay recently conducted a small, informal poll of 100 University students in which students overwhelmingly reported experiencing "a frosty intellectual climate hostile to academic freedom" in the hallowed halls.13 Kay attributes the suppression of academic freedom to the post-modernist and Marxist perspectives at large in the University environment. She reports a number of interesting anecdotes. For example, one student was stopped from using a number of highly respected literature sources, such as the Economist or Fraser Institute Reports, because they were "too right-wing." Another was told that mathematics is not a useful tool in research "because it is a male construct for a male-dominated world." Another was harangued because "educated people do not support Israel." Finally, another student was cut off by being told that the heretofore very respectable political analytical framework of "realpolitics" is dead and inadmissible to argument. Kay informs us that University staff with other perspectives also suffer attacks, and that at least one has had his course grades changed arbitrarily, been accused of being a fascist, and been told that he is brain-washing students. Referring to the current struggle for gay rights, and its potential destructive impact on children and schools, Cere says: "It is important to realize that one aspect of the context of this whole area [of struggle for gay rights] relates to the nature of public education. It ought to be obvious, and certainly is to me as I work in the education faculty, that the pressures to adapt the current curriculum to reflect changes to what might be termed 'public morality' are relentless in their zeal to affirm tolerance and inclusion. Such zeal, however, must be maximally respectful of both the role of parents as the primary educators of their children and the diversity (ethnic and religious) of the many groups of citizens who have a shared interest in being citizens of a diverse and respectful political regime. Jamming a particular vision of sexual conduct into the public schools is hardly consistent with this respect and, should it occur, might smack of nothing so much as a return to a new kind of indoctrination. It would be highly ironic and retrogressive if the social constructivist approach to sexuality (a highly controversial theory rejected by virtually all religious groups) were to be given a privileged recognition within society that is pledged to further democracy, pluralism and multiculturalism." 14 The language of the Equity Policy introduces this fight for the privileged recognition of homosexuality to the Hamilton community. Acceptance is to be fostered by the subtle but deadly combination of social constructivist ideology and political struggle against the culture. Secular humanism and tolerance are superseded by this militant new approach. |
Endnotes | |||||||
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